Great post. I love to hear these topics brought up. I'll try to address a couple of your points:

1) I completely agree with you on Toxic Synergy. I'd argue it's even worse than you might think since it actually doesn't affect DoT damage at all, only hit damage against enemies with DoTs on them. I'm all for seeing a more appropriate replacement. I know Neocore was considering an effort in the fall to rework the passive tree, but it's a massive undertaking, and in the end, they decided against it for season 2, largely due to not having made enough progress and wanting to get balance changes done elsewhere. I'll also agree the unlock requirements are somewhat steep---and that perhaps unlock requirements for passive trees aren't that much of a good idea at all.

2) I think you may be putting far too much weight into the passive tree. Inquisitor, unlike some other ARPGs, has a very weak passive tree in terms of how much it affects a build, especially damage. A lot of new players (you don't seem like you fall into this category, but I'll make the point regardless) ask for sample passive trees or guides to where they should invest their skill points, but the reality is that it doesn't matter that much. Sure, you should place points *somewhere*, and there are a few areas where reasonable benefits can be had (movement, cooldown, and resistance, for instance), but the bulk of a build's damage will end up coming from gear. It can be interesting to debate whether having a strong or weak passive tree is a good game design choice, but I think it's safe to say that Inquisitor will probably always have that lean. 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make things better, of course. But it's probably not worthwhile to focus on whether one passive tree has a 10% damage bonus more than another when a typical optimized build will have 1000-2000% bonus damage all said, mostly from gear. Why invest in the passive tree? Mostly because of one or two utility passives which have prerequisites. The damage benefit of a completely full passive tree is not substantial. Heck, I'm fairly sure you can craft a viable endgame character without allocating any passives whatsoever, which would be a completely insane statement in many other ARPGs.

3) I'm assuming you mean scrapping and replacing Toxic Synergy (perks are a different entity). 100% agree. Your idea of multiple stacks is interesting, although knowing how much time went into getting DoT stacking working---and how much still remains to be done---I think it's probably not technically practical. Vulnerability effectiveness for DoTs is another great idea, especially if it helped the problem of builds which leverage skills that apply multiple stacks of a DoT but have no equivalent means of applying multiple stacks of vulnerability. There are probably some open questions on implementation there, too.

But while we can debate details, you and I are generally on the same page: there's definitely some passives that don't really pull their weight, and it would be great to see the skill tree be a bit more even and compelling.

Again, I appreciate the perspectives. Thoughtful discussion and involvement can only serve to improve the game.

As it says in the title, the Telekinetic Blast / Shock masteries are listed twice for Shockwave. Also noticed generally the modifications for each skill seem to be haphazardly organized, yellow tags coming after purple etc on several skills.

Good find on the duplicates. The masteries got a huge overhaul in the S2 patch, and a lot of mechanics that very much did not work as they should've were fixed in the process. Looks like some warts got introduced in the process. As for the mod order, it does seem a bit off. I believe that the masteries must be added by a developer manually, so my guess is that it was just never noticed. The only significance of the coloration is which passive tree they are enabled with, so---while a bit ugly---at least it's not non-functional. (Same goes for duplicates, actually---it's totally a bug, but I'm glad that at least you can't add it twice.)

I also noticed the DoT mastery was removed from Shockwave and Bio-lightning. I can't say I'm happy about this. These were the only two skills available in the prior update that could inflict warp DoT. Without these, Psykers only have access to burns and bleeds without using a pistol or something to inflict poison. I suppose there may be a warp wand that inflicts DoT (I don't feel like researching), but the inconsistency and need to inflict damage via attack instead of skill would make this pretty lackluster imo. Makes the final perk on the DoT tree very nerfed and pretty boring.

This was part of a larger decision to remove warp heat entirely. It's no longer possible to apply it as of Season 2. A lot of the rationale for removing it was that it just did not have the item and skill support that the other DoTs did. There were *far* fewer ways to increase its damage, and---worst---only the Psyker could apply it. While you can very reasonably argue that's a neat thing (I'd personally probably agree with you), from a gameplay perspective it's kinda not great. It's harder to balance shared DoT-related skills, and it loads up more requirements on gear and skills (for instance, you have to make sure that no warp-heat-related things ever drop for other classes, or those players will be rightfully frustrated). Could warp heat have been salvaged? Sure. Was it worth it? Neocore decided it wasn't.

So whether you or I agree with the decision, that's the reason warp heat was removed. If you notice, *all* warp-damage psychic skills do not have the DoT mastery enabled. A lot of that is to avoid a weird anti-synergy where you deal one damage type but apply a DoT of another. This ends up in weird situations where, for instance, the vulnerability you apply doesn't affect the dot you apply. This also meant Hemo's damage type shifted from warp to physical in the patch.

So maybe you can take some solace in the fact that there is no warp wand with warp heat, and the final passive in the DoT tree is balanced more or less across all classes. (And it's not just the psyker that has to rely on weapons or gear to apply certain DoTs---most classes do.)

I know that DoT stacks now and all, but the rebalancing shouldn't be removing options from the player. Builds already feel constrained, putting further limitations isn't really getting me excited.

In general, I completely agree with you. I'd love to see mechanics fixed and balanced rather than removed. Sometimes, though, existing mechanics which are fundamentally broken or carry fatal flaws don't really offer true options to the player. Warp heat was one of those. If Neocore had kept warp heat on shockwave and bio-lightning, they'd lag significantly behind the other three in terms of damage and utility. They could've tried to fix all the things that were wrong with it, including adding new enchants, new archeo items, new ancient suffix classes, etc., but those all come with costs, both in developer time and in bloat. For instance, they probably would've needed to add a unique branch to the DoT passive tree just for Psykers and their warp heat to provide utility balance. In the end, they decided it was better to streamline the DoT choices and focus on making the primary three better.

Anyways, long post to basically say, "your opinions are completely valid, here's maybe some context to at least explain why things are the way they are". You can take it for what it's worth, and obviously I support you in providing feedback to the devs on their design decisions. I'm just another player, so these are just my opinions.

Thanks for the post!